~ Exploring one of the world's great cities

This is it! My last day in London. I wanted to spend some time outside, despite the crazy weather, in the midst of the busy city. Free walks are offered by Inmidtown, beginning at their kiosk just outside the Holborn tube stop. Today’s tour featured central London sites that were associated with the suffragettes, including several places where various suffrage groups were headquartered.

This building on Kingsway served as one of the headquarters of The Women’s Social and Political Union.

Our tour guide, Aly Mir, gave us a general history of the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain. We forget that women have had the right to vote for less than 100 years. The effort to get that right was lengthy and often ugly. In Great Britain and the US, the women won the right after World War I, but many nations did not grant women the right to vote until much later.

Although today’s kooky weather meant that one minute the sun was shining brightly and the next minute it was pouring rain, these walks are an interesting way to see the city by focusing on one aspect of its multi-layered history.

I think London wants me to go home. All week, the weather has been absolutely dreadful. Cold, rain, hail, wind, thunder. A few brief moments of sunshine, followed by drenching downpours.

And in all of this rain, the jack hammering continues as London works to replace their Victorian water pipes. Ugh!

On Monday, our trip to Kew Gardens was a little disappointing. While we enjoyed visiting the conservatories, it was just too cold and wet to fully appreciate the outdoor displays.

Then on Tuesday, I was stuck on a bus at the north end of Charing Cross Road, near the Tottenham Court Road station. A 30 minute journey lasted about 90 minutes. Traffic was almost at a complete standstill, and the bus driver wouldn’t let me off. “Not safe,” he said. The only solution for me was to pull out my latest knitting project and begin to knit. Knitting helped me to “Keep calm and carry on.”

It seems that there is a construction project on around every other corner in London, with construction cranes visible in every direction. Lately, there has been lots of jack-hammering just down the street from our flat. Maybe it’s all about making the city ready for the Olympics.

I’m back in London now, counting down my last few days and reflecting on the things I will miss when I return home. Our morning newspaper reading ritual is one of those things.

Every morning, Michael heads out to pick up the International Herald Tribune and the Daily Telegraph. Even though newspapers are a dying institution, here they still seem to offer interesting reading. I love how the Daily Telegraph offers not only hard news on politics, the economy, and international events, but also varied articles about the arts, nature, the latest research in multiple disciplines, as well as other general human interest stories. My favorite article in today’s paper is about research that suggests it is easier to find lost objects if the name of the object is said out loud. So the next time I can’t find my keys, I’ll be walking around saying “Car keys!” along with my prayer to Saint Anthony.